The fruits of flawed foreign policy

Thursday

Oct 25, 2007 at 12:01 AMOct 25, 2007 at 8:53 AM

WORLD WAR III: Turkey is threatening military action. Russia is buddying up with Iran. And the leader of the free world has invoked images of World War III if all involved don't behave. If this is what President Bush meant by 'stability' in the Middle East when he was beating the bushes for a preemptive strike in Iraq, well, can we retroactively take a pass?

So Turkey is threatening military action across its southern border into Iraqi Kurdistan in retaliation for rebel strikes that killed a dozen of its soldiers last weekend and at least 30 others this month. Russian President Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush's old soulmate, is buddying up with America's sworn enemy, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And the leader of the free world has invoked images of "World War III" if all involved don't behave.

If this is what George W. Bush meant by stability in the Middle East when he was beating the bushes for preemptive strike in Iraq four and a half years ago, well, can we retroactively take a pass? So glad we picked that little fight. Indeed, this nation's war of choice in Iraq has gone so wrong in so many ways, it's hard to keep up with all the scenarios in which, almost unimaginably, it could get worse.

As if civil war in Iraq wasn't bad enough, Turkey's involvement has the potential to turn that conflict into a regional war, and in the only part of Iraq — the Kurdish north — that actually seemed to have its act together. Turkey has already begun bombing along the border with the overwhelming support of its Parliament, and in fact sent warplanes to attack rebel Kurds hiding in the mountains there on Wednesday. There were unconfirmed reports of those fighter jets penetrating Iraqi — make that U.S.-controlled — airspace.

Not only are we potentially alienating a long-time ally and fellow NATO member, a secular democracy in the Muslim world, one of the few not to hate Israel, but the U.S. government doesn't have a philosophical leg to stand on in telling Turkey not to cross Iraq's borders to defend itself against terrorists, giving our own little "incursion" into Iraq for that very same reason. Like so many of our decisions regarding Iraq, we have again boxed ourselves in to a bunch of all-bad choices.

To further strain relations with Turkey, some House Democrats came down with an acute case of stupid, deciding the timing was right to condemn the Turkish "genocide" of Armenians 92 years ago, prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador.

The war in Iraq, of course, was supposed to scare our enemies into better behavior. Instead it seems to have emboldened some — think "axis of evil" member Iran — and to have made those we wrongly thought were our friends embrace those foes. Putin, who has visited Bush at both the ranch in Texas and the family's summer place in Maine, just became the first Kremlin leader since Stalin to travel to Iran. Now Moscow is talking up a military alliance with Tehran, and our own president is raising the apocalyptic specter of a third world war.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate has voted by a sizeable majority to declare unification and shared national identity in Iraq as essentially impossible goals. Humpty Dumpty is broken and can't be put back together again. And former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, just returned from exile to her native land, is an al-Qaida assassination target — a bomb apparently intended for her killed more than 130 of her countrymen and injured 450 others last week. Suffice it to say, perceptions of Bhutto as a friend of the U.S. have not made her any safer.

In fact we could go on about a world — and a Middle East in particular — that is not more stable, not at all. Iraq in 2007 is nothing like Americans were promised by their president back in 2003. About the only hopeful news is that the foreign policy nightmare that is the Bush administration will be over in less than 15 months.

The next president will have no easy job repairing this nation's reputation around the globe.

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